Dnipro journalist barred from attending a City Council session

Journalist Oleksandr Slavnyi was barred from attending the October 22 Dnipro City Council session. Slavnyi reported this to the Institute of Mass Information representative in Dnipropetrovsk oblast Olha Vasylets.

According to him, he had notified the City Council in advance that he would attend the session.

"The day before, a City Council representative called me and told me where to go and what time. They took me to the first floor of the City Council and told me that there is an award ceremony underway, which I could watch online. It would be followed by the restricted part of the session, and then I would be able to attend the open part. Later I saw that the deputies were starting to leave the building. I concluded that the session was over and a City Council representative confirmed it to me", said Oleksandr Slavnyi.

Oleksandr Slavnyi, IMI's screenshot of from a video by the Anti-Corruption Human Rights Council

According to the journalist, he had questions for the Propozytsia deputies Yevheniy Kryvosheyev and Serhiy Pustovoy, the European Solidarity deputy Kamil Primakov and the OPFL deputy Yuriy Korobov. Another question touched on whether the City Council session would discuss reducing the Council's PR expenditures.

The Dnipro City Council press office representative Darya Mizikina told the IMI representative that they only would be able to comment on the incident after a query.

Oleksandr Slavnyi contacted the police and the data he provided was entered into the unified register of pre-trial investigations under Article 171 of the Criminal Code, "Preclusion of the legal professional work of journalists". The journalist posted an excerpt from the register on Facebook.

Slavnyi said that he planned to publish his reports on his social media unless a news website takes interest in them.

Oleksandr Slavnyi previously worked on the TV channel Vidkrytyi, as well as Region TV, which began to change in 2018: for instance, the name changed to D1. "Detector Media" called the changes "pre-election transformation" in their analysis of the Dnipro media landscape. Since then, the TV channel has been opposing the city government and sympathetic to a group of Dnipro Mayor Borys Filatov's opponents. There is a dedicated article discussing the confrontation on the IMI website.

Activists of the "Money to the UAF" movement were also barred from attending the City Council session along with Slavnyi. According to Slavnyi, not allowing journalists, activists, and representatives of the community in general, to be present at the session was an order by the City Council leadership, their general stance.

As the IMI reported earlier, that police uncovered a city budget embezzlement scheme in Dnipro, which caused the loss of at least 34 million hryvnias. The scheme invloved fictitious media services for the Dnipro City Council.